


Half a Truth

by hellkitty



Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Angsty Schmoop, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-06-24
Updated: 2014-06-24
Packaged: 2018-02-05 23:57:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,908
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1836871
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/hellkitty/pseuds/hellkitty
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Just some schmoopy Drift/Ratchet for tf-rare-pairing.  Also because I need fluff.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Half a Truth

“A lot different from last time,” Drift said, with an incandescent smile, white feet kicking over the edge of the exam table. He looked happy. No one should be that happy, Ratchet thought, especially just a few weeks after getting a sword yanked out of their chassis. Their own sword. Put there by their own hands.

Drift had…issues. But that wasn’t Ratchet’s department. He could only work on the body.

“You sure you want to do this?” Probably a dumb question: Drift seemed immune to doubt. If he was here, he was serious about it.

An eager nod. “We’ll find the Knights, undo the damage. Undo, you know, all of it.”

It wasn’t that easy, Ratchet knew. You could fix a broken line, but even then, it was never as strong as the first. Damage didn’t just unhappen.

“Besides,” Drift continued, and some of the brightness left his voice. “There’s not much someone with my skills can do here.” The smile seemed to shift, liquid and nervous.

Ratchet bent, hooking up his scanner for a diagnostic. “Think a lot of mechs could say that.” They were all killers, even Ratchet. Only Drift seemed to feel so limited by it. Then again, it was the only thing he’d ever done.

“Not you,” Drift said, earnestly. “You can heal. That’s something people will always need.”

Frag, if Drift buttered him up any more he’d slip and hurt himself. “I’m not going to lie on this, you know.”

Drift blinked. “I wouldn’t expect you to.”

“If you’re not mission-ready, I’m going to say so.”

“Of course.” The blue optics looked almost hurt. “It’s why I came to you, Ratchet. I trust you.”

Frag, that was almost painful: big bright blue optics blinking into his own. “Stop it,” he muttered. “Not going to let you go rocketing off into space with that idiot Rodimus unless you pass my level of inspection. One of you is enough of a trouble-magnet. Two?” he shook his head. It defied his mathematical abilities to calculate how much trouble they could accrue.

“Ultra Magnus is coming with us, too, you know,” Drift said.

“Hnf. See how long that lasts.” Ultra Magnus had faced down everything short of the DJD, but Ratchet had every suspicion that if something could snap Ultra Magnus’s patience, it would be reading Rodimus’s daily reports.

“You know,” Drift said, his voice lower, almost intimate. “You could always come, too.”

He fixed Drift with a piercing look. “I am far too old to be zipping around the universe looking for trouble.”

“But we could use a medic. A good one. And you’re the best.”

“Did Rodimus put you up to this?” It still felt weird to call him Rodimus, not Hot Rod.

“No. No,” Drift repeated, more insistently. “He thinks, you know, it’s jinxing us to think like that.”

Ratchet sighed, the deep kind, that came from low down in his belly. Because that sounded exactly like Rodimus. “Fraggin’ jinx him,” he muttered.

“You’d have to come with us to do that,” Drift said, almost wriggling with excitement. He knew he’d won. Slaggit.

>>>.

“You sure you want to do this?” It felt like history repeating itself, again and again. Another time with Drift sitting in his medibay. But this time the red spaulders were hunched forward, the blue optics dimmed.

“There’s no other choice.”

“Yeah. There is. You could try the slaggin’ truth.”

“It’s not a lie,” Drift said. “Just only part of a truth. Half a truth isn’t a lie, really. Just the truth. With some little bits left out.”

“Pretty important little bits, don’t you think?” He couldn’t help the anger in his voice. Drift had always been a stubborn idiot, but this was too much.

“Rodimus can’t tell them his part of it,” Drift said. “It has to be me. Someone needs to pay a price for Overlord.”

Not you, Ratchet thought, even though his whole body still felt stung. Drift had known. All this time, they’d had Overlord in the ship, under the ship, and Drift had known, had held the whole hideous secret. It wasn’t right. It wasn’t fair to expose all of them to danger. A danger that had happened, and honestly, they’d gotten off easier than they had any right to have.

He was angry. And it was too tempting to blame it all on Rodimus, to accuse him (pretty accurately) of manipulating Drift, who, for all his skills with blades and guns, was still incredibly naïve when it came to people. Drift had been manipulated.

But he’d known it was wrong. He had to have. And still he kept quiet. So Ratchet would blame Rodimus, but not entirely. Drift had been wrong; but he hadn’t been alone. But here he was, choosing to take the penalty, alone.

“But—“

Drift cut him off with a shake of his head. “I didn’t come here to be talked out of it. I can’t change my mind, even if I wanted to.” He looked up, meeting Ratchet’s gaze for the first time. “Say I did, tomorrow. Say when Rodimus is denouncing me, I accuse him, too. Tell everyone everything. All of it.” He shrugged. “Who would believe me? ME? The ex-Decepticon?”

“I would.” He believed him now. He just hated that he believed him.

“And then what? The ship would be divided, at best, and….,” his hands fluttered on his thighs. “And we’d be lost.”

He had a point, and Ratchet hated to admit that, more than anything. The ship would be in chaos, either without a leader or split, mutinous. “Drift.”

“I just…I shouldn’t even have come to tell you anything,” Drift said. “And I wouldn’t, if I’d known it was going to be this hard on you. I just wanted.” The optics dropped again, to his thumbs, “I wanted to say goodbye.”

Frag. Ratchet snatched up the datapad, fighting a surge of frustration and anger and, well, emotions so sudden and hard that he wanted to throw something. But no. That wouldn’t solve anything: just get glass splinters everywhere.

“Come on,” Drift said, sliding off the exam table. “I mean, this doesn’t have to be sad or anything.” Ratchet would have corrected him—with a slap to the side of the head—if he thought Drift believed that himself. But it was the tone of voice of someone saying something like a charm, trying to will it into truth and being. “I could, for all we know, find the Knights before you guys do.” The smile on his face was like a flame in a windstorm, whipping around, struggling to stay.

“Yeah, whatever.” He wasn’t even going to pretend to be buying that.

“Ratchet.” And the voice grew plaintive now, as close to pleading as Ratchet had ever heard it. “This is my last night. I just wanted a good memory.”

Still so innocent, so simple, so fraggin’ naïve. And it still fraggin’ worked, Primus dammit. Because thinking of Drift floating around in space and his last memory was an argument with Ratchet? No. Drift had enough to face tomorrow, enough angry voices, enough pushing away. He didn’t need it here, too. “Yeah,” Ratchet said, leaning back on his desk, putting the datapad asde. “Fine.”

“That’s better,” Drift said, the smile gaining ground on his face, as his arms slipped over Ratchet’s shoulders, and he whispered, ‘thank you’ as his mouthplates brushed, tingly and warm, over Ratchet’s.

>>> 

“Hey, you all right?” Skids, popping his head into the medibay office. Ratchet jerked alert, more upset at being caught than anything else.

“Yeah, yeah, fine,” he muttered. “Just finishing up some paperwork.”

Not really, but there was, in a medibay as busy as this one, always paperwork to catch up on—inventories, patient files, scheduling. It never ended. And most days it provided a smooth, constant flow that carried Ratchet through his shift. Fix, focus, on to the next. Keep moving. Like a soldier, he figured, fighting his own battle.

Only sometimes…it didn’t, and he found himself sitting in his office, thinking. Or trying not to think, his mind floating back over the past. This late at night, maybe it wasn’t unusual that the mind ran toward regrets, like they’d simply waited in the shadows for him to notice them.

“You sure?” Skids asked, one large palm curling around the doorframe. “You looked, I don’t know, distracted.”

“That’s my thinking face,” Ratchet retorted, quickly. “I was probably doing math or something.” Or…something. Definitely something.

Half a truth is not a lie, he thought, and he could hear Drift’s voice, shaping the syllables. Not what he needed tonight.

“Okay,” Skids said. “I’ll, you know, let you get back to your, uh, math there.” There was something in his voice that made Ratchet look at the screen in front of him, the one that had First Aid's last game of minesweeper on it.  Level 246?  He was going to have to have a talk with First Aid. About his clicking finger, if nothing else.

"I said 'probably'!" he muttered at Skids's retreating back. 

"I'm 'probably' going to be in Swerve's bar, probably eating some rust sticks," Skids said, stopping and turning in the medibay door. "Odds are leaning to a double order. You know, if you want to talk."

Hngh. Last thing Ratchet wanted to do was 'talk'. Not right now, and not about...Drift.  Who was alone, out there, in space. Maybe dead, with no one knowing, no one around to mourn.  And Skids wanted him to go and drink and talk.  Go and talk when he could still, if he thought of it, feel the silky tingle of Drift's EM field under his hands, when he couldn't look at the medibay exam table out there without thinking of Drift arching up on it, biting down on Ratchet's name. 

Drift had said he'd wanted a good memory. Primus knew Ratchet had tried. And Ratchet could only hope that a memory was all Drift needed. 

He slumped under the inescapable feeling that he could have--should have--done something more. Kept Drift here, or...something.  But even now, he couldn't think of a way. 

And Drift...wouldn't want this.  He wouldn't want Ratchet to sit around and mope--if he came back tomorrow and Ratchet said he'd spent nights staring unseeing at computer screens swimming in regrets, he'd feel even worse than he'd had when he came to say that awful goodbye.

It wouldn't do any good, anyway, Ratchet thought. Impractical, at the very least. Worrying about Drift didn't help the swordsmech at all, didn't ease the other's loneliness, didn't dull one blade edge that might--he hoped not--aim at Drift's throat.

He sighed, reaching over to shut off the computer, rising to his feet, feeling the shadows fall around him.  He'd go, have a drink, listen, be around happy people. And maybe it would hurt, that they were here and happy and Drift was there and alone, but it was a hurt that told Ratchet there was still something in his old, battered spark, something that could feel, despite logic and practicality and sense. He could never figure what Drift had seen in him, nor Skids. He was a sour, grumpy old mech, after all, but he was still part of this crew, and the little ember of light and heat and hope under his chassis could glow just as brightly in the bar as here. 


End file.
